


Goodnight, Go Well

by tigress



Category: The Hobbit (2012), The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Childhood, Gen, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:21:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigress/pseuds/tigress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He has always been an older brother. Never, his parents said, anything less.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Goodnight, Go Well

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a kink meme prompt asking for one character consoling another while they are themselves dying.

**i.**

He has always been an older brother. Never, his parents said, anything less. As if that was the starting point of something extraordinary.

  
Fili is five when his brother is born – his tiny brother who cries so much that it keeps Mama awake all night and makes Fili stuff his own head under a pillow and wonder how this much noise could fit into something so small.

  
Why does he do it? He asks Papa once. There’s no rancour in it, or so Fili supposes. Papa gives him a strange look, sighs and makes room for his eldest to sit beside him at their work bench. ‘It’s better that he does it now than when we have to run,’ he says. He seems sad. Or rather, resigned. But that’s the kind of state that Fili is too young to understand just yet.

  
‘Listen,’ Papa tells him. ‘You must protect your brother.’ What from? He wonders.

  
‘There are so many things’, Papa says.

 

**ii.**

They don’t – run, that is – and Kili is no less loud. It simply becomes something else. The unquiet nights give way to days filled with mirth and increasingly inventive pranks. But for all the trouble Kili causes, there is no wickedness in him. He trails after Fili when Mama sends them out to market, barely two feet tall, with his hand-me-downs and ridiculous ears and the sweet demeanour of a child who is loved. He grows and laughs easily and angers the same, and once hits the grocer’s son hard enough to break his nose. He does it on Fili’s behalf. Not because Fili can’t fight, but because the look on his parents’ faces when he turns up bruised and dirty, with neighbours’ boys spitting insults in his wake, hurts him. And so he prefers talking, and Kili prefers hitting, and this is how it goes.

  
‘He has the mind of a diplomat, my sister-son,’ Thorin says when he hears about this. For all his darkness, he is kind, and his nephews have known nothing but love from him.

  
‘What’s that?’ Kili asks. He looks between his brother and uncle while Thorin explains, as if trying to decide if Fili is grown-up enough to fit inside such an extraordinary word.

  
‘And what am I, then?’ he asks when Thorin is done.

  
‘An orc, I shouldn't be surprised.’

  
Kili laughs so much that he nearly falls out of his chair.

 

**iii**.

No one but Fili seems surprised when Thorin names his heir. It makes sense, of course, but the announcement, the papers and letters and the King’s seal give it an air of finality. There is a celebration and wine and a long line of dwarves waiting to offer congratulations and express their hope that Fili will live a prosperous life without forgetting the humble character of his beginnings.

  
Kili embraces him tightly, and when they separate, looks at him with a fierce sort of pride.

  
‘You don’t mind?’ Fili asks him.

  
‘Are you joking?’ says Kili. ‘I couldn't bear the weight of it. No, you be the diplomat king and I’ll be a great general and we’ll see who gets the better songs.’

 

**iv**.

He has always been an older brother, and older brothers should not have to watch the younger ones die.

  
‘Fili, please,’ begs Kili. ‘Please, I don’t want to.’

  
He is no longer a child, for all the sweetness he still carries in him. Kili has fought and killed without a spare thought, and perhaps even taken pleasure in the exhilaration of it. But here, now, he is a child, frightened and hurt beyond what a body should be able to endure; and he implores Fili, he says, do something, I don’t want to die.

  
There is nothing to be done, Fili realizes. Before anyone comes for them, Kili will be dead, and he will die too, with a broken spearhead lodged between his ribs. He will never be a diplomat king, and Kili will not be a great general. There will be songs about them, Durin’s heirs, but songs are made for heroes, so they will not say that one was terrified and the other heartbroken. There will be nothing about how Kili held onto his brother and wept, or how Fili could do nothing but stroke his hair and hope that he will not die first and abandon Kili to this.

 

**v**.

There are so many things, their father told him once, long ago. There are orcs and wargs, mountains and treacherous waters, there are blades and arrows and there is betrayal, and it seems to Fili that he has failed at every step. But then there is this: when he next sees his parents in the Halls of Waiting he will say, I did not leave my brother to die alone. I watched over him until his last breath, though my own was a long time coming. I closed his eyes and I laid him on the ground and lay beside him. It should not be possible to bear this, so I did not.

It’s a very small consolation.


End file.
